[pfhorge]

When I was a kid, I got to take some Logo programming classes at Purdue. I can't imagine how much more intuitive and visceral it would have been if we'd had Minecraft instead of blank white screens.

I happen to play Minecraft now, and I just finished writing a 3D Perlin noise generator in Lua so that my turtles can build structures with some randomization. I'll be adding code to pixellate my smooth, mathematical paths into minecraft blocks using Bresenham's line algorithm. I've also written programs to do highly efficient mining with minimal effort on my part. I've seen programs written by other people that control a fleet of turtles from a central computer, and programs that run complex farming operations. There's so much breadth of possibility with something like Minecraft and ComputerCraft.

If Minecraft is like playing with Legos online with your friends, ComputerCraft is like Mindstorms. I envy the kids who start out on this stuff.